Moralising the gale of political defections

In the past two weeks and more, Nigeria has been inundated by defections as politicians continue their jostle to be relevant and achieve strategic placements within and across party lines. The defections have been fairly osmotic, with the solvent political gladiators moving more from the burgeoning All Progressives Congress (APC) to the breathless, diminished and somewhat disoriented Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Similar movements were observed in 2014, before the 2015 elections, as angry and displaced politicians moved cheek by jowl from the then ruling PDP to the impressionable and hesitant APC. Few are surprised that the annual peregrinations have now begun in earnest.

There will always be defections, perhaps not on the scale witnessed before the 2015 polls and this year’s, but the defections will in all likelihood continue to be anchored on extraneous and sometimes flimsy reasons rather on solid and ideological factors. As long as poverty subsists and overwhelms, and the country’s political and economic structures are not radically reformed and transformed, the attitude towards public office and politics will remain fundamentally narrow and predatory. Politicians will, therefore, subordinate the more ennobling task of public service to the demeaning and amoral search for pork and greener pastures.

It was important that both the ruling party and President Muhammadu Buhari correctly gauge the mood of the country and examine the factors that predispose Nigerian politics to the constant display of amorality witnessed in the past few weeks, and earlier in 2014. Instead, the APC has been scurrilous in its dismissal of the defectors, and the president has on his own embraced grand moralisations, even viewing the defections as God’s pruning hook to sanitise and sanctify the ruling party. It is not clear that they have accurately depicted a process that has become, to many, sickeningly familiar, for the defections, while sometimes and even often objectionable, are not a moral issue. Going by the scale of the defections, they in fact indicate deep fissures within the polity and the grating mismatch between the yearnings of the electorate and the ambitions of their representatives.

Speaking at a rally in Bauchi organised to support the candidacy of Lawal Gumau who is campaigning for the Bauchi South senatorial bye-election, President Buhari alluded to the defections as God continuing “to fish out the bad eggs among us.” In a statement credited to his spokesman, Femi Adesina, the president said: “The work we are doing is because of God, our country and you. I want to inform you that with the knowledge we have garnered over the years, we won’t allow you to be cheated. Like we promised, what will determine a good future for the country are security, strong economy and to stop corruption. We campaigned on these things, you voted for us and we will never forget…”

The problem the president did not address is why God should pay special attention to his party above the others, or view his party as more righteous than any other. It is always problematic infusing religion with politics in a secular country, and where even atheists reserve the right not to be discriminated against on any ground. The president can speak of ideology, if he has one, propound political theories of his choosing, assert his party’s rights anyway he deems fit, sell his party’s manifestoes and programmes in glowing terms, and love his party to unfathomable end. But to insinuate that God is not at work in other parties, or to suggest that after the defections only the righteous would remain in the APC, is stretching the controversy beyond polemical limits.

It is not surprising that the proselytising approach to politics adopted by the president has triggered unsavoury, excessive and unconstitutional responses from law enforcement and security agencies. Shortly after Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State defected from the APC, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) swooped on the state to initiate probes and investigations. Some of the probes are believed to have resulted in the unconstitutional measure of freezing the accounts of the state. Not to be left out, the police, as is their custom, and presuming to be only interested in forestalling the breakdown of law and order, aided and abetted a futile attempt to impeach the governor. They incongruously provided cover for some eight Benue State lawmakers to work on the impeachment effort, and barred the majority from gaining access into the legislative chambers. The desperate attempt has miscarried, but not before indicating clearly that the federal government is unable to have a proper understanding of the defections saga, not to talk of adopting the right approach to building a great and enduring democracy.

The Senate President, Bukola Saraki, is undoubtedly Machiavellian, and his politics often lacks substance and is destitute of ideology. Most other defectors to the PDP are hewn from the same morally and ideologically barren rock. But there is no denying the fact that the APC has itself been ideologically inconsistent, administratively incompetent, and in large parts ethically indistinguishable from the PDP. For the past three years, it has not propounded or provided any new insight into the concept of the rule of law, or of justice both within the party and outside, or of the rights of the people and the obligations of government. Indeed, the jury is out on which of the two leading parties is more ethically challenged.

With the president unable to develop a proper understanding of the dynamics of the defections, and with APC leaders downright peevish about politicians migrating from their fold, it may take much longer for Nigeria to put an end to the political opportunism that undergirds and frequently convulses Nigerian politics. The feisty new chairman of the APC, Adams Oshiomhole, has averred that ideological politics would curb defections and opportunism. At least he is original and thoughtful. But even then he may have oversimplified a problem that is evidently rooted in the complex and malformed structure of the country. In fact, apart from the calls for restructuring, indications are beginning to emerge that Nigeria may be faring much worse under presidentialism than it fared under parliamentarianism. What these suppositions imply is that without a fundamental rearrangement of the country, and with increasing poverty and incompetent leadership, the spectre of defections and opportunism will neither end nor be minimised.

It is unlikely that the president will change his perspective on the defections, even though he has in the same breath contradistinctively welcomed defections into his own party. In addition, no one should expect the APC to be less strident about denouncing the defectors as it goes to extraordinary lengths, like the president, to welcome defectors from the PDP. And it would be overly sanguine to hope that the APC, which could not even summon the discipline to implement its manifesto on the so-called true federalism, would develop a blueprint to sanitise Nigerian politics and structure it for the long visionary haul. With the situation remaining very desperate and confused, with the country unable to produce great leaders across the hobbled parties, and with Nigerians themselves yielding supinely to the execrable politics that has impoverished the country and turned it into a continental laggard, there seems to be little hope that politics in these parts would ever be sanitised or regain scrupulousness.

But rather than engage in a war of words with the PDP, the ruling APC must make greater efforts to deconstruct the defection phenomenon within the context of Nigerian politics. The party needs to eschew its simplistic understanding of the crisis; and it needs to ginger its leading apparatchiks, particularly the president who wields inordinate influence over the party, to adopt a saner, more sensible and level-headed approach to reorienting Nigerian politics. It must not think it can bludgeon the opposition and defectors into submission; nor should it sanctimoniously hope that in the end it can ethically outlast and outperform the PDP. It is a chimera. For 16 years, the PDP carried on recklessly and superficially as if another day and era would not come, as if it could self-perpetuate endlessly. It is truly tragic that the APC, sensing that they cannot play the sublime politics evinced by their manifesto, appears to be treading the same thorny and sanguinary path that ultimately doomed their predecessor.